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The Winner of the Match, 1864
Henry Garland (1834-1913)
MCC Collection: donated by Mrs H A Doubleday
Oil on canvas
M.1959.TN.39
Cricketers of the Excelsior Cricket Club celebrating a victory. The winner of the match is carried high on the shoulders of his team mates, and another bears a red flag embroidered 'Excelsior Cricket Club' in gold.
The Club is not known in cricket history, but the flagpole with Excelsior, meaning ‘higher’ wrapped around it, is at the highest point of the triangular pictorial structure. On the left corner the defeated batsman (artist Henry Garland) sheds his gloves and gazes lovingly across the composition at a mother and child. Garland’s son Valentine Thomas would have been about three when this scene was painted.
In keeping with Victorian genre narrative paintings there is sense of time and moral message. The long evening shadows and discarded bottles suggest the day is passing and the spectator’s eye is directed away from the hero of the hour to the child gazing back at the batsman, a reminder of the sweet victories in life.